Historical Medical Knowledge
The Nesarian Empire, due to its total isolation from the outside world for much of its history, developed its own medical theories and practices separate from the rest of the world, which ended up being beneficial for it as they came to different conclusions about medicine to ancient and medieval Europe and Western Asia - for example they were not held back by the misguided ideas of humours as Europe was. The multicultural nature of the Empire also allowed (in the early stages) for medical schools of thought with wildly differing theories to come together and debate, greatly enhanced by the introduction of the Imperial Medical College in the 8th century AD, which also improved the standard of medicine in general by handing out qualifications for competent doctors, and it became a crime for unqualified doctors to not tell patients they were unqualified. Most of what will be described below was thought of as scientific fact until the "medical revolution" of the 19th and 20th centuries when modern medical theory was developed. Organs Medical theory relating to organs was developed primarily by Osdarthian doctors, who had uniquely extensive access to wounded and dead people due to the near-constant religious conflict in the region. By the 1st century AD, Osdarthian doctors had worked out that the heart was responsible for pumping blood around a network of blood vessels that supplied blood to the muscles and other organs, which they thought was consumed by the organs as "fuel" in order to carry out their function. Initially they thought that the heart produced blood, but by the 2nd century AD it was commonly accepted that the heart was only used to pump blood, and it was the lungs were primarily responsible for producing blood, and air was either a key ingredient of blood or a catalyst needed to make it. Around the same time, Osdarthian doctors also decided that the stomach and intestines were used to suck all the nutrients out of food, and the waste product was excreted as faeces (which also contributed to the Osdarthian theory of food, that a lot of food was made up of waste product, and so there was a great focus on nutrient-rich food as it was believed processing waste food was a waste of energy and blood). The bladder had been known to be responsible for the storing of urine since approximately the 3rd century BC, but it was also thought to be responsible for producing urine until the 10th century AD, when it was found the kidneys were responsible for producing urine. Osdarthian doctors had little knowledge of the reproductive system, and the bulk of this theory was devised by Qaateeni doctors in the 4th century. Initially they had little knowledge of the female reproductive system, but had come to the conclusion that semen produced in the testicles made up the building blocks of a foetus, but a foetus could only be "assembled" in a female womb. This was largely held to be true until the development of fine microscopes in the 19th century when scientists could clearly observe egg and sperm cells. Most other organs were assigned the purpose of "miscellaneous bodily functions" with little knowledge as to what organs such as the spleen and liver did until the 19th and 20th centuries. Disease Nesarian doctors had assembled a basic theory of disease by the 2nd century BC. They theorised that disease was caused by malicious spirits that could be transferred through contact, air or water, and found it much easier to get in through wounds than unbroken skin - not too dissimilar to modern germ theory. This theory did not change until The Trouble, a catastrophic plague that devastated the Empire during the Time of Troubles in the 10th century AD. Due to the vast number of patients that The Trouble created, doctors were free to experiment with various techniques, and they found that keeping everything (including themselves and the patient) as clean as possible reduced the chance of infection, and a new theory developed that disease was caused by some sort of substance that attacked the body like acid did, and the symptoms of an infection were variously either a result of the substance attacking the body or the body attacking the substance. For example, it had been realised by the 12th century that a fever was caused by the body trying to destroy the substance by heating it up. The substance theory coexisted with the spirit theory until approximately the 16th century, when it supplanted the spirit theory. The substance theory was in turn supplanted by germ theory in the 19th century.